Dreamcatcher

by Stephen King

Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.

“That’s right, rabbit,” he said. And then, because there really were no other options, he started up the last hill between him and a real road.

As a result of such memories, Jonesy was positive March fifteenth had already happened. There were all sorts of evidence supporting the thesis, his office calendar being Exhibit A. Yet here they were again, those troublesome Ides . . . and now, oh goddam, how was this for unfair, now there seemed to be more of the fifteenth than ever.

Death pretending to be a patient. Death had lost track of him—sure, it was possible, it was a big hospital stuffed full of pain, sweating agony out its very seams—and now old creeping death was trying to find him again.

Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time travel when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.

He walks on, swinging his case, not listening to the Jonesy inside, the one who has swum upstream from November like some time-traveling salmon.

He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well.

He glimpses something more, as well: some huge pattern, something like a dreamcatcher that binds all the years since they first met Duddits Cavell in 1978, something that binds the future as well. Sunlight twinkles on a windshield; he sees this in the corner of his left eye. A car coming, and too fast. The man who was beside him on the curb, old Mr. I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, cries out: “Watch it, guy, watch it!” but Jonesy barely hears him. Because there is a deer on the sidewalk behind Duddits, a fine big buck, almost as big as a man. Then, just before the Town Car strikes him, Jonesy sees the deer is a man, a man in an orange cap and an orange flagman’s vest. On his shoulder, like a hideous mascot, is a legless weasel-thing with enormous black eyes. Its tail—or maybe it’s a tentacle—is curled around the man’s neck. How in God’s name could I have thought he was a deer? Jonesy thinks, and then the Lincoln strikes him and he is knocked into the street. He hears a bitter, muffled snap as his hip breaks.

Once acceleration passes a certain point, all travel becomes time travel. Memory is the basis of every journey.

Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won’t even open. And yet old Mr. ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that gray head inclines slightly.

In the cluster surrounding him, just behind old Mr. I-Didn’t-Say-Anything, Jonesy sees Duddits Cavell, now fully dressed and looking okay—no dogshit mustache, in other words. McCarthy is there, too. Call him old Mr. I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock, Jonesy thinks. And someone else, as well. A gray man. Only he’s not a man at all, not really; he’s the alien that was standing behind him while Jonesy was at the bathroom door. Huge black eyes dominate a face which is otherwise almost featureless. The saggy dewlapping elephant’s skin is tighter here; old Mr. ET-Phone-Home hasn’t started to succumb to the environment yet. But he will. In the end, this world will dissolve him like acid. Your head exploded, Jonesy tries to tell the gray man, but no words come out; his mouth won’t even open. And yet old Mr. ET-Phone-Home seems to hear him, because that gray head inclines slightly.

I’m what they were looking for. I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because . . . the cloud doesn’t change me?

He is helpless to stop and understands that he is in the cloud. Not a redblack cloud, as both Pete and Henry sensed it, however; the cloud is gray and he floats within it, a unique particle that is not changed by the cloud, and Jonesy thinks: I’m what they were looking for. I don’t know how it can be, but I am just what they were looking for. Because . . . the cloud doesn’t change me?

Nor does he fear infection. He is unique and the cloud can only carry him, not change him. He opens the door and goes inside.

He is unique. The cloud can carry him, but it cannot change him.

You’re not going to drink my blood, are you? Like a vampire?

You’re not going to drink my blood, are you? Like a vampire? The thing in the bed smiles without smiling. We are, so far as I can express it in your terms, vegetarians. Yeah, but what about Bowser there? Jonesy points to the legless weasel, and it bares a mouthful of needle teeth in a grotesque grin. Is Bowser a vegetarian? You know he’s not, the gray thing says, its slit of a mouth not moving—this guy is one hell of a ventriloquist, you had to give him that; they’d love him in the Catskills. But you know you have nothing to fear from him. Why? How am I different? The dying gray thing (of course it’s dying, its body is breaking down, decaying from the inside out) doesn’t reply, and Jonesy once again thinks No bounce, no play. He has an idea this is one thought the gray fellow would dearly love to read, but no chance of that; the ability to shield his thoughts is another part of what makes him different, unique, and vive la différence is all Jonesy can say (not that he does say it).

These things we each don’t want the other to know, we’ll set them aside to count later. We’ll put them in the crib.

Now he’s the eggman, and the eggman knows better.

He is unique. He senses that Pete, Henry, and the Beav are also unique (was unique, in the Beav’s case), but he is the most unique of all.

He is unique. He senses that Pete, Henry, and the Beav are also unique (was unique, in the Beav’s case), but he is the most unique of all. You’re not supposed to be able to say that—like the cheese belonging to the Farmer in the Dell, unique supposedly stands alone—but this is a rare case where that rule doesn’t apply. Pete and Beaver were unique, Henry is uniquer, and he, Jonesy, is uniquest. Look, he’s even starring in his own movie! How unique is that, as his oldest son would say.

And ye gods, all at once there are three Jonesys: the one watching TV in the fungus-crawling hospital room, the one in the snowmobile shed . . . and Jonesy III, who suddenly appears in Emil Brodsky’s crewcut Catholic head. Brodsky stops walking and simply looks up into the white sky.

Some of what I saw was real . . . valid recovered memories, Henry might say. I really did think I saw Duddits that day. That’s why I went into the street without looking. As for Mr. Gray . . . that’s who I am now. Isn’t it? Except for the part of me in this dusty, empty, uninteresting room with the used rubbers on the floor and the picture of the girl on the bulletin board, I’m all Mr. Gray. Isn’t that the truth?

We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win. Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future.

You’ll never get out of here, Jonesy said. I will, Mr. Gray said. We always die and we always live. We always lose and we always win. Like it or not, Jonesy, we’re the future. If that’s true, it’s the best reason I ever heard for living in the past, Jonesy replied, but from Mr. Gray there was no answer. Mr. Gray as an entity, a consciousness, was gone, merged back into the cloud. There was only enough of him left to run Jonesy’s motor skills and keep the snowmobile pointed toward the turnpike. And Jonesy, carried helplessly forward on whatever mission this thing had, took slender comfort from two things. One was that Mr. Gray didn’t know how to get at the last piece of him, the tiny part that existed in his memory of the Tracker Brothers office. The other was that Mr. Gray didn’t know about Duddits—about no bounce, no play. Jonesy intended to make sure Mr. Gray didn’t find out. At least not yet.

Seeing someone shot in the head took a lot of the fuck-you out of a man.

Perlmutter had read Heart of Darkness, had seen Apocalypse Now, and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient.

A liberal arts education didn’t have many benefits in the career military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.

Melrose returned Kurtz’s smile tentatively, Perlmutter with less reserve. He had Kurtz’s number, all right; the boss was an existential wannabe . . . and you wanted to believe that was a good call. A brilliant call. A liberal arts education didn’t have many benefits in the career military, but there were a few. Phrase-making was one of them.

“What about you, bucko? Listening? Because you’re a messenger, too. All of us are messengers.”

“I quote from the Manual of Affairs, Cook’s Third Melrose, Part 16, Section 4, Paragraph 3—‘Use of inappropriate epithets, whether racial, ethnic, or gender-based, are counterproductive to morale and run counter to armed service protocol. When use is proven, the user will be punished immediately by court-martial or in the field by appropriate command personnel,’

Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr. Gray’s outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr. Gray already knew: the alien presence in his head was more human now.

“There are two types of Ripley,”

“There are two types of Ripley,” Henry said, stating as fact what he only believed . . . but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. “Call them Ripley Prime and Ripley Secondary. I’m pretty sure that if you didn’t get a hot dose—in something you ate or inhaled or something that went live into an open wound—you can get better. You can beat it.” Now they were all looking at him with those big doe eyes, and Henry felt a moment of surpassing despair. Why couldn’t he just have had a nice quiet suicide? “I’ve got Ripley Prime,” he said. He unknotted the tee-shirt. None of them would do more than glance at the rip in Henry’s snow-powdered jeans, but Henry took a good big look for all of them. The wound made by the turnsignal stalk had now filled up with byrus. Some of the strands were three inches long, their tips wavering like kelp in a tidal current. He could feel the roots of the stuff working in steadily, deeper and deeper, itching and foaming and fizzing. Trying to think. That was the worst of it—it was trying to think.

“Then, at the last minute, Underhill—maybe at the last second—one of them found a man who was remarkably different from all the others with whom the grays, the weasels, and the byrus had come in contact. He’s your Typhoid Mary. And he’s already out of the q-zone, rendering anything you do here meaningless.”

Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down.

Standing outside the compound fence by the back wall of the old storage shed, freezing his balls off, filter-mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a series of cigarettes he did not want (he’d gotten a fresh pack in the PX), Owen would have said he never felt less like laughing in his life . . . but when the man in the shed responded to his eminently reasonable question with such impatient directness—you do believe it . . . I’m a telepath, remember?—a laugh was surprised out of him, nevertheless. Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down. Owen had grasped the concept, but now he understood it on a gut level, too. “The question, though . . . the question is . . .” What are we going to do about it? Tired as he was, Owen could see only one answer to that question. “We have to go after Jones, I suppose. Will it do any good? Do we have time?” “I think we might. Just.”

“Kill Kurtz,” Henry said. “That’s the answer. It’ll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it’ll put the . . . the biological cleansing on hold.”

It’s not how they really are, it’s just the way we see them.

TO THOSE LOST IN THE STORM MAY 31, 1985 AND TO THE CHILDREN ALL THE CHILDREN LOVE FROM BILL, BEN, BEV, EDDIE, RICHIE, STAN, MIKE THE LOSERS’ CLUB Spray-painted across it in jagged red letters, also perfectly visible in the truck’s headlights, was this further message:

TO THOSE LOST IN THE STORM MAY 31, 1985 AND TO THE CHILDREN ALL THE CHILDREN LOVE FROM BILL, BEN, BEV, EDDIE, RICHIE, STAN, MIKE THE LOSERS’ CLUB Spray-painted across it in jagged red letters, also perfectly visible in the truck’s headlights, was this further message: PENNYWISE LIVES

He suspected Mr. Gray was tempted, as only an essentially formless creature could be tempted when offered form—a trade right out of a fairy-tale.

Owen couldn’t raise Henry by calling out loud, the man was too deep in exhausted sleep, and so he called with his mind. He found this was easier as the byrus continued to spread. It was growing on three of the fingers on his right hand now, and had all but plugged the cup of his left ear with its spongy, itching growth. He had also lost a couple of teeth, although nothing seemed to be growing in the sockets, at least not yet.

“After that we’re going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.”

But how did you explain funny to a collection of spores from another world? And what was funny about Dysart’s proclaiming itself the best truck stop on earth?

The cop was working his pie—with slightly suspicious slowness, Jonesy thought—and as they passed him, Jonesy felt Mr. Gray as an entity (an ever more human entity) dissolve, going out to peek inside the cop’s head. Nothing out there now but the redblack cloud, running Jonesy’s various maintenance systems.

Lots of things are buried in Derry.

MISSING, says the single block-capital word under the photo. And below that, in slightly smaller type: JOSETTE RINKENHAUER, LAST SEEN STRAWFORD PARK SOFTBALL FIELD, JUNE 7, 1982. Below this there is more copy, but Henry doesn’t bother reading it. Instead he reflects on how odd Derry is about missing children—not like other towns at all. This is June eighth, which means the Rinkenhauer girl has only been gone a day, and yet this poster has been tacked way up in the corner of the notice-board (or moved there), like somebody’s afterthought. Nor is that all. There was nothing in the paper this morning—Henry knows, because he read it. Skimmed through it, anyway, while he was slurping up his cereal. Maybe it was buried way back in the Local section, he thinks, and knows at once that’s it. The key word is buried. Lots of things are buried in Derry. Talk of missing children, for instance. There have been a lot of child disappearances here over the years—these boys know it, it certainly crossed their minds on the day they met Duddits Cavell, but nobody talks much about it. It’s as if the occasional missing kid is the price of living in such a nice, quiet place. At this idea Henry feels a dawning indignation stealing in first to mix with and then replace his former goofy happiness. She was sweet, too, with her BarbieKen. Sweet like Duddits. He remembers how the four of them would deliver Duddits to school—all those walks—and how often she’d be outside, Josie Rinkenhauer with her scabby knees and her great big plastic purse: “Hi, Duddie.” She was sweet.

Dreamcatcher, he thought, and once more his head filled up with Henry’s past, almost drowning him in the sights and sounds and smells of that day on the edge of summer: Dreamcatcher.

Duddits is their dreamcatcher.

“Dreamcatcher,” Beav says, and they understand each other as they sometimes do, as they think (mistakenly, Henry will later realize) all friends do. Although they have never spoken directly of the dream they all shared on their first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall, they know Beaver believed that it had somehow been caused by Lamar’s dreamcatcher. None of the others have tried to tell him differently, partly because they don’t want to challenge Beaver’s superstition about that harmless little string spiderweb and mostly because they don’t want to talk about that day at all. But now they understand that Beaver has latched onto at least half a truth. A dreamcatcher has indeed bound them, but not Lamar’s. Duddits is their dreamcatcher.

Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their ears.

She opens her mouth and says, Hi, Duddie. Looks around and says, Hi, you guys. Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their ears. Pete is crying. So is Jonesy. The wino is gone—he’s apparently collected enough for his bottle—but another man has come, a solemn man dressed in a winter parka in spite of the day’s warmth. His left cheek is covered with red stuff that could be a birthmark, except Henry knows it isn’t. It’s byrus. Owen Underhill has joined them in Strawford Park, is watching them, but that’s all right; no one sees this visitor from the far side of the dreamcatcher except for Henry himself.

They walk across Strawford Park, following a line only Duddits and Pete can see while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them.

They walk across Strawford Park, following a line only Duddits and Pete can see while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them. At the north end of the park is a rickety board fence with a sign on it: D.B.& A. R.R. PROPERTY KEEP OUT! Kids have been ignoring this sign for years, and it’s been years since the Derry, Bangor, and Aroostook actually ran freights along the spur through The Barrens, anyway. But they see the train-tracks when they push through a break in the fence; they are down at the bottom of the slope, gleaming rustily in the sun.

The girl’s weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope.

The girl’s weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope. She’s peering up at them, her face a smudged white circle in the gloom. They stretch their chain farther, being as careful as they can despite their excitement. Jonesy has got his feet braced against a huge chunk of fallen concrete. Josie reaches up . . . gropes . . . cannot quite touch Pete’s outstretched hand. At last, when it seems they must admit defeat, she scrambles a little way up. Pete grabs her scratched and filthy wrist. “Yeah!” he screams triumphantly. “Gotcha!” They pull her carefully back up the pipe toward where Duddits is waiting, holding up her purse in one hand and the two dolls in the other, shouting in to Josie not to worry, not to worry because he’s got BarbieKen. There’s sunlight, fresh air, and as they help her out of the pipe—

Henry lapsed into thoughtspeak—it was easier. Duddits changed us—being with Duddits changed us. When Jonesy got hit by that car in Cambridge, it changed him again. The brainwaves of people who undergo near-death experiences often change, I saw a Lancet article on that just last year. For Jonesy it must mean this Mr. Gray can use him without infecting him or wearing him out. And it’s also enabled him to keep from being subsumed, at least so far.

“Six billion people on Spaceship Earth, versus one Jonesy.”

Once the numbers got big enough, they didn’t, couldn’t lie. Six billion was a very big number.

Tell me what happened after you pulled the kid out of the drainpipe.

“Byrus or Ripley, it’s all the same,” Kurtz said. “These fellows are trying to poison our wells. To pollute our precious fluids, as somebody or other once said.”

Gary . . . Gray, Kurtz thought. By their anagrams shall ye know em.

Didn’t see that coming at all, did you, buck? Kurtz thought. Telepathy didn’t help you one damn bit there, did it?

Didn’t see that coming at all, did you, buck? Kurtz thought. Telepathy didn’t help you one damn bit there, did it? “No,” Pearly said dolorously. “You can’t do much with someone who doesn’t know what he’s going to do until it’s done. You can’t do much with a crazy-man.”

Mr. Gray enjoyed bingeing on human emotions, Mr. Gray enjoyed human food, but Mr. Gray most definitely did not enjoy evacuating Jonesy’s bowels.